The history of desegregation in the United States dates back to 1954 after the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education by the Supreme Court, which stated the law of segregation was unconstitutional. The major misconception surrounding the history of desegregating public schools in the United States is that: not all public schools were desegregated after the ruling of the Supreme Court in 1954. The duty of desegregation was left to lower federal courts: especially in the South, which took the process of desegregation district-by-district. The South was very resistant to the transition from segregation to the desegregation of public schools. However, by the 1970s, the South had a dramatic transition of desegregation and there were more integrated schools in the region as compared to the rest of the United States (Cascio et al. 296). By 1976, about half of the Southern public schools were not supervised by Court for desegregation, which was motivated by the increase in economic incentives as well as legal pressures.
School districts, especially in the Southern region, were categorized under those supervised by Court and those with no court supervision. Segregation status in a district supervised by a court was determined by the prevailing state of law, among other idiosyncratic factors based on judge preferences and the district’s conditions. The school board decided the level of segregation for school districts with no court supervision. The school board decided on segregation status by evaluating the opportunity cost of maintaining segregated schools and voters’ preference to maintain or eliminate segregation (Cascio et al. 297). Voluntary desegregation with no court supervision was based on opportunity cost. Cascio and colleagues cleared the misconception that all United States schools were desegregated after the Supreme Court ruling on the case ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ (Cascio et al. 297).
Work Cited
Cascio, Elizabeth, et al. “From Brown to busing.” Journal of urban Economics 64.2 (2008): 296-325.